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Welcome to Site Bytes, your resource for tips on developing, maintaining and marketing your website. If you have a question that isn't answered here, send us a note and we'll do our best to point you in the right direction. Our current article is below. To see our other articles, please visit our blog.

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getting started with analytics

Don't know how your website is performing? Then how about getting started with web analytics? Try Google Analytics - it's free - all you need is a Google email (gmail) account. Many host providers also provide their own free version of web analytics software. Here are few highlights to help you get started:

Referring sites: where is my traffic coming from?

This report will tell you how potential customers are getting to your site. Do they arrive via Google, Yahoo or another search engine? Through your press, an article or blog? Or were they referred from another website? Perhaps you need to work on optimizing your content for search engines, drum up more publicity for your company or write some articles to attract business. Knowing how your customers are getting to you will help you figure out what you need to work on and which avenues are already working for you.

Keywords: how are customers finding me?

This area tells you which keywords were used and clicked upon to find your site. This helps you understand which words might be worth paying for in a paid search campaign or incorporating into your site's content to improve your standing in search results.

Bounce Rate: who cares about me?

The bounce rate gives you the percentage of people that landed on a page and left without clicking any further into the site. (Let's face it, you can't be all things to all people.) Some users are going to arrive at your site and find that it's not what they want. And you won't find statistics on what's considered a "good" bounce rate for an industry, so much of your analysis here will be subjective. But if you're selling "web design" and 80% of the people who enter "web design" arrive at your site leave without researching you further...it's time to reassess and make some changes.

[Click here to read more on Getting Started with Analytics]

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